The Perfect Storm - Part 1

Like several other ad watchers and pundits, I've been tracking with interest not just the flogs but variations on the theme establishing a trust bridge in order to entice users into free trials for unknown brands. The products promoted almost always fall into the healthy and beauty categories and focus on predominantly natural weight loss supplements derived from edible products, e.g. Acai, supplements created chemically but based on organic compounds, e.g. Resveratrol and nitric oxide, teeth whitening kits, and work from home programs.

The products themselves all seem to share the following:

Low cost to manufacture

Easy to ship

Indeterminate value (higher perceived value)

Perceived need to continue using them for maximum efficacy

The marketing methods almost always:

Try to tell a personal

Tell a believable story

Create a sense of authenticity

Leverage trusted media brands

Leverage celebrity likeness and at times directly imply endorsement

Big results for little effort

The above is especially true for what we might call Flog v2 - the Fake News Sites / Fake News Articles. Instead of telling a personal story using a fake person in a blog format, they tell the story from the point of view of a reporter or journalist. It doesn't have the same level of personal connection as the mom, but treating the above like a formula, they increase the level of authenticity to compensate.

This banner left is an example of one running on display right now, and it has all the necessary ingredients and then some, looking very little like an ad and mixing media property metaphors at will - leveraging 60 minutes, Barbara Walters, Dr. Oz, and for the first time that I had seen, promoting not a blog but a news site - The Boston Tribune.

As many reading know, no publication named The Boston Tribune exists, but it certainly sounds like a reasonable publication, and using the iconic imagery of the clock and other known brands only gives this "publication" and what they have to share with you more credence. People will click on a banner that says lose weight with NuAge Resveratrol, but not many. Mentioned before, this is an economics game, a classic performance marketing arbitrage example, and without certain effective returns (high clicks on ad, high clicks on landing page, and conversions) they cannot afford the media.

Whether this arbitrage advertiser pays on CPM or not, they must still perform well enough to receive the incremental impressions on the inventory. In cases like this, they often lose sight of the message and focus on figuring out any way to hit the performance metrics necessary to receive high volume inventory.

Clicking on the banner above takes you to the following landing page:

The Boston Tribune

This particular site is part news site part review site, listing the product at the bottom - a dead giveaway that the site is purely marketing and not informative. As the first news site I came across, I found it particularly clever and evil; yet, as it turns out two things that shouldn't come as any surprise did. 1) This site is no longer up at its old address, and 2) others have replaced it much more devious and misleading in nature.

Here is one -

News9News.

You will notice the pre-requisite video clip but also something completely new. It has weather on the side, a graphical header of random people but that you must infer are the news cast, even "ads" along the side. The entire site looks and feels like a page off the local news site. For all that is bad, they chose a relatively innocuous site name. The same cannot be said of the following.

Los Angeles Tribune News

This site, also no longer live, married the best of both worlds - the news looking site and a copyright infringing style of brand. Unfortunately, the name of the publication is a little small. Something corrected in future versions.

New York Finance News

They refined the template, shifted a few things around, and better leveraged the other media brands. Best of all, they realized that they now had the perfect mini-platform. Witness...

The Atlanta Tribune News

There is only so far that this template can go, so it only makes sense to have another. May I present...

New York Guardian News

Just different enough, but not by much. And why not one more for your viewing pleasure.

Miami Gazette News

From an ad guy's viewpoint, the pages and methods used provide their own fascination, but the more interesting question is what's going on to contribute to proliferation of such ads. Feel free to share your views. Part 2 will be on not the big waves caused by the perfect storm but the conditions that enable it.